The Boy, the 2016 film about a creepy doll that looks like Jared Kushner, is getting a sequel. In The Boy 2, Katie Holmes will find herself facing off against Brahms, a doll with a dark secret. Of course, if you saw the first film, you already know what that secret is. But that’s not going to stop original Boy director William Brent Bell from telling this story.

Hollywood has Stephen King fever, and pretty soon every single thing the man has written will find its way to the screen. The latest King adaptation is From a Buick 8, based on King’s 2002 novel about a car from another dimension. It’s a lot less silly than it sounds. William Brent Bell, who helmed the 2016 creepy doll film The Boy, will direct.

It’s official: between the new trailer for The Boy and the upcoming sequel to Annabelle, possessed dolls are officially a trend. Ready your spec scripts, ladies and gentlemen. Murderous inanimate objects are in.

The new trailer for The Boy does look familiar, but comfortably so. Sometimes, all you need is a movie where a toy stalks a woman (Lauren Cohan, a.k.a. Maggie on The Walking Dead) through an oppressive Gothic mansion, forcing our in-over-her-head heroine to solve mysteries, survive countless jump scares, and maybe escape to the end credits with some breath left in her lungs. The killer doll subgenre of horror cinema may not be the most respected corner of the genre, but it has its moments.

Early this year the film The Devil Inside became a strange sensation. Released in the dead of January and powered by an unexpectedly successful marketing campaign, the film took in a $53m domestic haul even as it left many audiences unsatisfied at the end. The film became only the sixth to earn an ‘F’ CinemaScore; the CinemaScore system tracks audience satisfaction, but doesn’t necessarily correlate to the quality of the film. (The other Fs were Solaris, Bug, Wolf Creek, Darkness, and Richard Kelly’s The Box.)

With that sort of financial return — the film cost only a million bucks — director William Brent Bell and co-writer Matthew Peterman became a hot ticket. Now FilmDistrict may end up distributing the duo’s next film, a horror thriller called WER. Read More »

After the success of Paranormal Activity, Paramount created a small division called Insurge. The purpose of that company offshoot was to make or buy several ‘micro-budget’ films each year — essentially movies made for about a million dollars that could (hopefully) replicate some of the success of Paranormal Activity.

The first Insurge effort is this: The Devil Inside, in which a young woman named Isabella visits her mother, who has been held in what seems to be a Vatican-run institution after killing three people during an exorcism. The trailer has just hit, and it shows the film to be some combination of the now-familiar approach of the ‘found footage’ horror genre and more traditional film narrative. It also has some reasonably creepy scenes of demonic possession. (Or of great Satanic yoga poses, though I guess to some extreme fundamentalists, possession and yoga are basically the same thing.)